Doing the Right Thing for Eric Garner

Twenty-five years ago this summer, Spike Lee released “Do the Right Thing,” the most overtly political film of his young career. Set in Brooklyn on the hottest day of the year, the film is a contemplation of the explosive racial dynamics of late-eighties New York City. When two black men, Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) and Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), organize a boycott to demand that the proprietor of the local pizza parlor add some photos of black people to his “wall of fame”—along with Sinatra, DiMaggio, Pacino—a fight breaks out. Police arrive and place Radio Raheem in a chokehold, despite protests from other community members. Moments later, his lifeless body falls to the pavement, setting off a riot that tears the neighborhood apart. For those who lived in New York during those tumultuous days, “Do the Right Thing” was barely a work of fiction; instead, it reminded them of recent history—the death, in 1983, of the graffiti artist Michael Stewart, whom police put in a chokehold and beat to death on a subway platform; the death of Eleanor Bumpurs, the following year, at the hands of the N.Y.P.D. officers seeking to evict her from her Bronx apartment; the racial conflagrations of the city’s Howard Beach and Bensonhurst neighborhoods—refracted through a cinematic lens. That familiarity, the close relationship between screen and reality, led audiences to see Lee’s film not so much as a work of art but as an amicus brief in the court of public opinion. (The future President and First Lady, then a pair of newly minted African-American attorneys in Chicago, saw “Do the Right Thing” on their first date.)

That cinematic sense of déjà vu was revisited last weekend, after video of the death of Eric Garner, on Staten Island, surfaced. In the video, Garner, a large African-American man who’d had previous run-ins with police for the unauthorized sale of cigarettes, repeatedly tells police he’s done nothing wrong: “I didn’t sell anything! I did nothing—I’ve been sitting here the whole time.” (Some bystanders maintained that Garner was present on the street because he’d just broken up a fight.) One officer slips behind Garner and hooks his forearm across his throat before several officers wrestle him to the ground—what looks like a chokehold, which the police are, by their own rules, not supposed to use. Garner can be heard saying, “I can’t breathe.” E.M.T.s from Richmond University Medical Center then arrive, but they don’t intervene to any great effect (a number of them have been suspended pending a review, the Timesreported). Garner was later declared dead. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton launched an investigation, and the officer who was holding Garner has been told to turn in his gun and badge. Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted his condolences and called Garner’s family. The official cause of death has yet to be determined, but the incident was familiar enough that Lee himself recognized the art-life nexus and posted a video on Instagram and YouTube in which he spliced footage of Garner’s death with the chokehold scene from “Do the Right Thing.” It’s entirely possible for an uninformed viewer to believe that Lee’s scene was inspired by Garner’s death instead of preceding it by a quarter century.

Twenty-five years is just long enough to assess whether a work of art is capable of transcending its generation and speaking to truths applicable even to those who don’t share the context in which it was created. But it would be wrong to see this as a testament to how well Lee’s film has held up. Rather, it suggests something more basic: the images remain familiar twenty-five years later because time has passed but in crucial ways our context has scarcely changed at all.